In normal Banville fashion, every word in The Sea throbs with implication, setting up a novel drenched in absolute linguistic perfection, even from the opening line: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.”

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Maybe accepting a prestigious honor for your latest work by saying, “It is nice to see a work of art win the Booker prize,” is not graciously endearing, but John Banville has long been both scorned and adored by the literary world; and so when The Sea took home the Booker, a little dust-up was scarcely unexpected. That he towered over such rich works as the other short-listed titles Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry, The Accidental by Ali Smith, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and the inspired Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro may have been against the odds, but no one could have feigned surprise; after all, Banville’s fulsome, crackling style may rub some readers the wrong way, but his 14 novels are perfectly drawn slivers of literature which sip from the Nabokovian well. What’s truly astounding is that such a sublimely stylized meditation can even be published in today’s marketplace where unabashed lyrical childlessness is sometimes confused with literary talent.

In normal Banville fashion, every word in The Sea throbs with implication, setting up a novel drenched in absolute linguistic perfection, even from the opening line: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” The book opens with the aesthete and aging art historian Max Morden, unsteadied by the loss of his wife to cancer, and returning to the Irish costal town, and a house called the Cedars, where he spent a youthful holiday. His reflections work themselves loose, entwining the present and the past in an awkward and captious humanity, lending the novel a parallel force through which Banville continues to blanket his prose with incomparable mastery.

In The Sea, it is the peculiar Grace family, complete with mother, father, and children (Myles and Chloe), whose lives the young Max enters that summer, and the early part the book allows the melancholy remembrances to beat with verve:

So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance. We were waiting in our as yet unfashioned world, scanning the future as the boy and I had scanned each other, like soldiers in a field, watching for what was to come.

Where in past books Banville lit his narrators with a glacial unease, such as in The Untouchable and Shroud, Max breaches a new way into the author’s work. Narrating with the obscured sincerity of the past, the tale weds itself to the warmth Max exudes as he sorts through the entirety of his life—from passion to loss, and every cranny that hides in between. Very little propels the book other than Max’s recounting, but the singular mindedness and focus of the narrator is why the novel is ultimately a commanding work, delivering strident passages like this:

We have had a storm. It went on all night long and into the middle of the morning, an extraordinary affair. I have never known the like, in these temperate zones, for violence or duration. I enjoyed it outrageously, sitting up in my ornate bed as on a catafalque, if that is the word I want, the room aflicker around me and the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones. At last, I thought, at last the elements have achieved a pitch of magnificence to match my inner turmoil! I felt transfigured, I felt like one of Wagner’s demi-gods, aloft on a thunder-cloud and directing the great booming chords, the clashes of celestial cymbals.

Toward the end of the book, as revelations start unpeeling themselves through the narration, the outcomes of the young and the old Max are never far from one another. This duality of existence is something one rarely seeks for capitulation, but in The Sea, Banville basks the language in the ever-shifting modes of time and memory—tragic vagueness where love is as staunchly confusing as age, death, and art:

As I walked behind her amid the trudging crowd, I touched a fingertip to my lips, the lips that had kissed hers, half expecting to find them changed in some infinitely subtle but momentous way...like the day itself, that had been sombre and wet and hung with big-bellied clouds when we were going into the picture-house and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows.

It’s a constant with Banville, the restrained icy exterior foliage that pushes so many away, but that is really camouflaging a warm meadow within. There’s heart in The Sea, and readers can be richly rewarded for taking their time and wading in, one word at a time.

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